00:00Well, my first reaction was surprise that no one had reached out to me, you know, the past when such things have happened.
00:08In fact, it's just happening now. You know, people might option my books or whatever.
00:15So for a long time now, really, ever since I heard that Murphy was planning to make Keane the subject of his third season,
00:24I have been feeling aggrieved and resentful because I worried that Ryan and his co-creator, Ian Brennan, were going to kind of rip off my book, you know, under the pretext that it was all in the public domain, you know, that Keane was his public figure.
00:51And there are things, you know, when I wrote Deviant back in 1987, true crime was considered a kind of pulpy, subliterary genre.
01:02And the model that I was using was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which he called a nonfiction novel, by which he meant, you know, applying novelistic techniques to telling a true story.
01:14That has since become known as creative nonfiction.
01:18And I was very consciously writing in that mode when I did Deviant.
01:26You know, I tell people that my motto at the time was taken from the last line of the first chapter of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
01:38The narrator, the big chief says, it's the truth, even if it didn't happen.
01:45So there are certain scenes in my book, primarily having to do with Geane's interactions with his mother, because there are no real, I mean, other than the few things I'd said about it in his confessions, you know, we don't really know what went on between them.
02:03Uh, so they were sort of imaginative reconstructions on my part.
02:08So my main worry at the time, uh, and going up to the moment I watched the show was that, uh, there was going to be a lot of unauthorized use of my book.
02:20After watching the show, I mean, there is some unauthorized use of my book, I feel, but the show that veers so wildly from the reality of the case, so much of it is pure over the top fabrication.
02:41Okay.
02:43That now I'm mostly upset that all the people who watch the show are going to think they're seeing the true story of Ed Geane, which, you know, they're, you know, they're obviously in terms of broad outlines, you know, his relation to his domineered mother, the grave robbery, you know, the making of these ghastly objects out of the body parts.
03:10And so on, you know, those are pretty accurate, but a very large percentage of the show is just, is just made up.
03:24Yeah. Ryan Murphy does have a trend of dramatizing his projects.
03:28Were you, did you watch the Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, uh, seasons as well before this?
03:32You know, so much of my time is spent researching and writing about crime that I don't watch a lot of true crime stuff.
03:42Yeah. Well, Ryan Murphy, you know, Ed Geane has become a kind of mythic figure.
03:46Uh, and on the one level, you know, Ryan Murphy has every right to treat the story, uh, dramatically.
03:57Uh, I mean, I, I think I made my book dramatic, but I did it with stiff sticking with the facts.
04:04I mean, what Murphy has done, I haven't seen the other shows, but certainly in this case, well, either Murphy or Ian Brennan, who wrote it, uh, just, you know, invented these outrageous things.
04:17Yeah. Which have no relationship to the truth, you know, the true facts of the Ed Geane story.
04:23What was the most outrageous to you in terms of the entire show? Was there one specific storyline or one character portrayal, human portrayal that you.
04:32Well, I mean, it's, you know, even when I watched the very first scene, we see Ed engage in autoerotic asphyxiation. I'm like, where did that come from?
04:42You were like, oh, this is going to be an interesting journey. We're starting off with the first scene like this.
04:46Yeah. But it has no, there's no evidence whatsoever that Ed ever enjoyed that particular activity. Um, but then, you know, the way he, the character of Adeline Watkins, you know, the real, who is this beautiful young woman who's very close to him. I mean, the real Adeline Watkins, uh, first of all, I don't want to seem cruel, but if you see photographs of her, you know,
05:16she bears a striking resemblance to Margaret Hamilton and the Wizard of Oz. Um, and, and their relationship, uh, I'm pretty convinced didn't really consist of anything more,
05:28you know, than possibly maybe Geane once asked her roller skating or something. They didn't really have a relationship.
05:34You know, she was kind of a publicity hound when all the media descended on Plainfield after the discovery of the crimes, she suddenly came forward as Ed Geane's girlfriend. But, you know, the notion that Ed Geane, uh, you know, helped solve the Ted Bundy murder. The other thing, I mean,
05:53I had many questions about that because I didn't feel like that was entirely accurate. I assume it wasn't.
05:58Well, not only was it not entirely accurate, I was like, huh?
06:02No, it's wildly, wildly made up.
06:06The other thing that's made up very, you know, importantly is that Geane wasn't a serial killer.
06:14Yes.
06:15You know, the whole mission, right? By definition, by definition,
06:18He was not a serial killer because the term serial killer was specifically coined to describe a certain kind of psychopathic sex murderer, an extreme sexual sadist like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, who derived erotic pleasure from torturing and then killing victims.
06:41That was not, that was not what Geane was about. I mean, he did kill these two women, but, you know, he executed them very swiftly.
06:49He was basically just interested in bringing their corpses home, you know, so he could dissect them.
06:54He was not a serial killer. And the notion that all these serial killers at the end, uh, Brudos, I forget, sort of, you know, were inspired by Geane.
07:03Um, A, Richard Speck. I mean, I feel pretty confident that none of them even knew who Geane was.
07:13Right.
07:13They wouldn't have been inspired by them because he was not a serial killer.
07:17Right.
07:17So, you know, my jaw dropped at, you know, how, how, how shameless, uh, the whole production was.
Be the first to comment